There is no way Tesla survives this. They have plummeting sales every quarter, and Elon is pushing out a product that is going to get into an accident within the first week.
Robotaxis are glorified Ubers and will never level up to Waymos. FSD is useless if you have to keep your eye on the wheel and road.
I have a Tesla Model Y. It's my favorite car I've ever driven. I subscribed to FSD as recently as last month for one month to try it out. It doesn't work as well as a Waymo, not even close. It still feels like a really good high school demo but not close to being in the same ballpark as Waymo.
But Elon has killed his brand with his politics, and the robotaxi initiative is a desperate attempt to gain ground. But it's going to kill someone and it will be 100% on him because he's the one pushing this when there's no way it will ever be ready for real world situations the way Waymo is.
They might require the passenger to sit in the drivers seat and take liability, or push it back a few more months, or only run it at 3AM when there is no traffic.
I don't think any of these would tank the stock price, since historically Tesla has gotten away with similar skulduggery. I learned the hard way many years ago to not bet against Tesla, and I don't see anything here that would override that lesson.
Fingers crossed for you though - I definitely think Tesla is irrationally priced, and there would be a certain justice in that overinflated valuation sinking down to reality.
All of these things. On a previous investor call, he said "10-20 Model Ys" would be deployed in Austin.
And that they'd all have remote operators.
And that fully autonomous would be geofenced (or in his words, "with some limitations", because he's allergic to that word).
It's "fully autonomous, driverless self-driving" that's actually heavily Mechanical Turk-ed.
Not Tesla. Musk was, but that ship sailed together with his nazi salute.
Oh yeah, you can't, they're in jail.
Last I checked there were 35K fatal accidents in the US every year - if FSD can bring that down to 3.5K that will be an obvious win.
Cars, one of life’s current greatest killers. by accidents and by pollution-hmmm, let’s run down that evil dude!
edited: made on writing mistakes
It's been a great way to lose money so far.
I don't think he got even 5% of the vote. The voting on Reddit combined with a number of other features of the site just give you this really twisted idea of the way people around you think. I don't think it's good to even visit it.
Unless FSD improves on these -- which I don't think it does, I think it just adds features -- I can't imagine trusting it.
Yes, I'm a control freak, but I wouldn't be happy with a human driver doing the things AP does, so why would I be happy with the car doing it?
I've seen it action only in my friend's Tesla in SF, and he also had to manually intervene, but to be fair Tesla themselves say you must be ready to take the wheel at any time. I think it may reach fully autonomous level with a few more years in the oven though.
Tesla stock is a cult stock. People buy it because it goes up. It always goes up. Wall street has long been clued into the brain damage and delusions it's core investors have, and are more than happy to play into the fantasy. Its a company of perpetual massive promises while always carefully dancing around "hammer drop" days.
Robotaxi isn't launching, it's being rolled out over months slowly. Which will turn to years, but like always Elon will be "1 year away" to Tesla paradise. Everything this company is priced on is slowly "rolling out" with the full launch "just around the corner".
Tesla FSD right around the corner
Tesla Semi right around the corner
Tesla <$25k EV right around the corner
Tesla robotaxi right around the corner
Tesla Optimus robot right around the corner
Tesla supercar right around the corner
And people really genuinely believe this is all right around the corner, so load up now while it is still "undervalued"...
But just to be honest here, the people who have full on bought into the hype have made incredible amounts of money.
They'll only have made incredible amounts of money once they sell the stock for an incredible amount of money to a buyer that gives them incredible amounts of money. Before that they just have a share of the above empty promises.
I wonder if his constant lies are becoming more scrutinized now. This will make it harder to keep up the game of making outlandish promises that are only 1 year away.
I think a lot of people would like to think this is true, ironically because of his politics.
What if his political allies allow and enable him to push this upon the populace despite it killing people.
After all, other industries have been allowed to kill plenty of people if it makes money and lines the pockets of friendly politicians of all stripes.
Maybe nobody is forcing you to get in a robotaxi, but behavior normalization based on availability is a powerful force.
Regulatory protection will not help Tesla the first time it runs over a random pedestrian. It will be a PR nightmare.
Does he have any of those left? Like, he just had a very public spat with Trump, and despite his attempts to crawl back, Donald doesn't really seem to be taking the bait. Who is his political constituency at this point, far right never-Trumpers? That seems fairly marginal.
Tesla can definitely survive this. They've got a low cost base, tens of millions in the bank, a rabid fan base, access to capital. It'll probably change next quarter, but as of right now they're still profitable.
Their trillion dollar capitalization is highly unlikely survive, but Tesla as a company making cars has a very long runway to survive mistakes.
I also have Tesla puts but that is brave!
While extremely overvalued by any metric, Musk has also been somehow able to keep the stock flying high for years and years on the force of hyperbolic lies (full self driving only a few month away forever) which most of the market keeps believing. It's a fascinating counterexample to the idea that the stock market can't be fooled.
So I only keep a few puts at a time because the hype surrounding the stock tends to outlive the expiration on the options. Every now and then I cash in big when it has a nice drop though.
Over time they are going to run into all the problems of public infrastructure in low trust places like NYC where, unattended, you will have people use the backseat as a dining room, smoking lounge, bar and toilet. Time will tell how they deal with bad riders.
I mean, if this were a _normal_ company, that would make sense. But it's Tesla, so it's a very dangerous game, because Tesla's stock price is at best only peripherally related to Tesla's business. You're in great risk of Musk posting a meme or having another child with a silly name or whatever, thus pushing up the stock price 10%.
- https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1934623551694508456/photo... - "(Obi) The Road Ahead:Pricing Insights On Waymo, Uber and Lyft" https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25973106-obi-waymo-6... - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-06-16/why-tesla-c...
Best-selling BEVs worldwide January-April 2025, according to new data from EV Volumes:
1) Tesla Model Y 2) Tesla Model 3 3) BYD Seagull/Dolphin Mini 4) Wuling Mini 5) Geely Geome Xingyuan 6) Xiaomi SU7 7) BYD Yuan Plys/Atto 3 8) BYD Yuan Up/Atto 2 9) Wuling Bingo 10) Xpeng M03
- Tesla has very few models. The model Y is more than half of Tesla's total sales. The Seagull is less than 10% of BYD's total sales. A better metric is total sales per company by either volume or dollars.
- Tesla already sells pretty much everywhere, so don't have the "easy" option of expanding sales by expanding into other markets. OTOH, the Chinese brands are not yet widely available in several large markets.
This was the 90s and Apple had only just narrowly avoided bankruptcy, but as they only had one model (even one colour!) of "cheap" consumer PC whereas everyone else had loads, they were by this measure the best seller.
* or the region, I forget, after all it was the 90s.
FSD has gotten amazingly better over the last year, it can and has taken me from driveway to driveway between two cities... when the weather is nice. As soon as there is any weather however, things start to fall apart. It's very clear to me that vision alone wont be the solution to FSD, and is the main reason why I believe Waymo's approach here is simply better.
That's not to say vision wont work when the environment is good - FSD has gotten to the point where when things are optimal, it's a better driver than I am (ie it does better at merging into a lane of traffic better than I could, since it has 360 vision), but it simply isn't stable in the face of dynamic conditions.
Would note that most premium cars sold in America currently have advanced self-driving capabilities. I've personally been more impressed by Mercedes' kit than Tesla's, mostly because the former seems to have done a great job of defining where you can almost trust the system to just work.
Also, I think it keeps getting overlooked that freeways are designed from the ground up as a exclusive use of motorized vehicles. FSD performs OK there. But, taxi services are everywhere in cities around the clock in all sorts of weather. And I can't imagine trusting FSD for that use case.
As I frequently mention in these "sanity response" posts, it's not perfect. Sun in the camera will sometimes cause it to bail. Maybe once a day, I take over because I'm not sure of its decisions. I share the skepticism that the same FSD I'm using can be fully autonomous, but with deep, current map data like Waymo has, maybe they can pull it off.
that's literally just I-5 all the way, with probably 5-10 minutes of street driving at either end. So does FSD really offer _that_ much more of a benefit over adaptive cruise control with lane keeping unless you're continuously overtaking?
I've tried enabling FSD on my Tesla twice (got two one-month trials), and really wanted to love it but was disappointed with the results when not on highways. My wife tried it once and won't touch it again.
You're not wrong, the 3hr drive only involves 14 turns. Where FSD helps:
1. This is a very common trucking route, and often involves navigating 18 wheelers rather than just following, which the FSD is able to navigate. 2. Lots of major mergers, which again requires a bit more navigation. 3. Lane designation changes are fairly common - ie bus only lanes / carpool lanes
It's not a major amount of things, but it's still a noticeable difference between just lane centering / adaptive cruise control.
Let's try Pittsburgh in snow in December, and then see.
Mind you as recently as 12 months ago there were still videos of Teslas happily taking straight lines through roundabouts.
I do find it interesting that it's valuable enough for me that I'll plan my drives between the two cities around the weather, so I can have it on for the trip.
Whatever company gets true self driving (ie no weather restrictions) to the market first is going to make an absolute killing. It's so valuable, Tesla's just isn't reliable yet.
It's entirely possible that the opaqueness and small scale of the Tesla rollout could lead to situations where long tail events like the Cruise collision simply don't occur, or aren't allowed to reach public media.
The ensuing cover-up attempt wasn't, though.
> the automaker posted a new job listing days ago for engineers to help build a low-latency teleoperation system to operate its “self-driving” cars and robots.
It's June 17; they're supposedly launching in five days. Even if it's 95% off-the-shelf software, that timeframe for getting it up and debugged, then hiring enough humans to operate it, makes absolutely no sense. After nearly a decade of broken promises about FSD, has Elon finally trapped himself? Will there be a handful of "robotaxis" circling around a few blocks of Austin with Mexicans hiding in the frunk to drive them?
I'm glad I don't live there.
If you believe he was out to change the world - maybe he'll let Tesla die. It's unlikely they are going to accomplish much else at this point, better, smarter more experienced competitors are sweeping the board.
If you believe he's out to make as much money as he can, he'll probably course correct at some point. Lidar it is clear will be the future of self-driving, and with all the adopters the economies of scale will kick in at some point.
Well, twitter shows that he'll burn money if it suits his ego. However, I think his bigger problem is his promise to all existing Tesla owners that FSD would use cameras. If Tesla switches their approach to lidar they'll probably be facing a class action suit from all those camera-only Tesla buyers.
[1] https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-re...
If these robotaxis end up looking more like my experience than yours then another layer of trouble will be root causing and fixing failure modes. Training models e2e makes both of these much more difficult.
But we don't want drivers because....
So strange to me.
Taxis are a useful way to get around, including to and from public transit. That's all that should matter. Whether they fit into a particular urban vision is secondary to the fact that they're desirable to the people living there.
I don't understand the singular focus on them. (Again, maybe because I don't live in Manhattan).
I think the actual concern is around medium-to-large cities and metros, where self-driving cars will compete directly with mass transit, much like Uber does, but potentially much more competitively.
With a human driven taxi I'd be able to tell the driver which entrance I'd like to be dropped off near.
Does Waymo provide a way to do this? Has Tesla said anything about if they will allow such a thing?
As long as the Robotaxi is just and idea, it can't fail. Once it's real, people can realize what a joke it is.
Relevant Silicon Valley:
"If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!"
Tesla tried for the moonshot - They wanted a consumer car with cheap sensor hardware to perform the job. Trusting that computing "smarts" could solve the rest of the problem.
I'm in Atlanta where Waymos have started popping up left and right - the sensor bank on these things is HUGE. You can spot 'em from way far off... Giant sensors on top. Big sensors on the front wheel wells back wheel wells, big sensors on both front and back. Big sensors basically all over them.
I'm of the opinion now that Tesla was just way, WAY off base about what sort of requirements exist for sensing, and that they don't, in fact, have much more real world training data because their data is just garbage from the cameras.
Waymo is winning because Waymo accepted the actual requirements early. Tesla is off in lala land with a dead end solution. Lots of great marketing from tesla... but very little progress now in years. They really seem stuck in a local optimum with the camera-only approach, and it's not close to delivering the promised experience.
Except, they took even that out because a certain someone leading the company thought they don’t need the sensors. It’s like someone trying to figure out how to make a bicycle balance itself and they decide to take the wheels off.
Have you looked at their financials? They're terrible.
My feeling is that Waymo has the data advantage.
Tesla can scale by simply adding vehicles.
This is a crippling disadvantage. Consider what it takes to evaluate a single software release for a robotaxi.
If you have a simulator, you can take long tail distribution events and just resimulate your software to see if there are regressions against those events. (Waymo, Zoox)
If you don't, or your simulator has too much error, you have to deploy your software in cars in "ghost mode" and hope that sufficient miles see rare and scary situations recur. You then need to find those specific situations and check if your software did a good job (vs just getting lucky). But what if you need to A/B test a change? What if you need to A/B test 100 changes made by different engineers? How do you ensure you're testing the right thing? (Tesla)
And if you have a simulator that _sucks_ because it doesn't have physics-grounded understanding of distances (i.e. it's based on distance estimates from camera), then you can easily trick yourself into thinking your software is doing the right thing, right up until you start killing people.
Another way to look at it is: most driving data is actually very low in signal. You want all the hard driving miles, and in high resolution, so that you can basically generate the world's best unit testing suite for the software driver. You can just throw the rest of the driving data away -- and you must, because nobody has that much storage and unit economics still matter.
This is to say nothing of the fact that differences between hardware matter too. Tesla has a bunch of car models out there, and software working well one one model may not actually work well on another.
In reality, just shovelling data into a box is not sufficient.
https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/1928477936845226469
https://x.com/TeslaCamera/status/1929167075731239226
https://x.com/friscolive415/status/1881181885445063041
https://x.com/LAMultiBroker/status/1885370114054512921
https://x.com/ananayarora/status/1808679192432927153
https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/1929590206488883246
https://x.com/TheTrailerDan/status/1934618081881370766
https://x.com/JeffTutorials/status/1778188663253574035
https://x.com/ScannerPacific/status/1935016023536844960
https://x.com/greggertruck/status/1864836542402797812
https://x.com/neil_csagi/status/1803229926033858746
I could post these all day ...
